On Kolkata’s roads, there are always men at work, working through the night. From my years of conversation with many of them, I know that their shift often goes on past sunrise, after which they don’t necessarily get rest.

Yakub Memon was hung at the early hours of July 30. This was preceded by hectic activity in Lutyens’ Delhi, televised live with self-congratulations that made Bharatmata blush. Her eyes must have widened with excitement and moistened with pride as she saw Attorney General and others doing their duty far past the midnight hour. “Grandmother, what big eyes you have!” cried the child tutored to believe that grand-mothers are necessarily loving creatures. We know how that one ends.

On Kolkata’s roads, there are always men at work, working through the night. From my years of conversation with many of them, I know that their shift often goes on past sunrise, after which they don’t necessarily get rest. That some human beings may work at night when others are sleeping, isn’t exceptional. Millions toil like this hourly, daily, monthly, yearly, generationally. It’s only when those who never work this hard at any hour of any day of their lives, let alone at 3am, deign to do something like that, it becomes a ‘rarest of the rare’ spectacle. Duty and diligence become the flavour of the night. Such selective adulation is an insult to road-makers, truck-drivers and millions of others who spend their nights under oppressive, life-threatening conditions, not for the ‘nation’, to stealthily ‘encounter’ or ‘disappear’ others, but for mere survival. Theatre by frauds has huge currency. Like when out-of-power gods almost smelled the armpit of humans in Dalit villages between exotic vacations. Like when powerful gods embraced and bowed to some old woman with high-power spectacles in the crowd after selling entire coastlines to friends-in-need. We rock.

Barring the few who were part of the hectic late-night Lutyens saga not as part of job-description but from their ethico-moral churnings, the rest agreed that justice was done. The Indian Union stands in a minority among UN member nations in having death-penalty. Most countries that practise death penalty call themselves ‘Islamic Republic’, whatever that means. In the last decade, Indian Union has been the sole practitioner of death penalty in South Asia among nation-states that don’t have Islam as the state religion. It’s the only one that seriously considered bringing children under the ambit of death-penalty. We have reasons to be very proud.

Not all citizens of the Indian Union share such views. Parties with huge support-bases like DMK, AIADMK, Akali Dal, etc have opposed death-penalty publicly and have led strong movements against it in specific cases. If anything, they were responding to public sentiments against hanging. So not all collectives in the Indian Union have the same kind of conscience. Death-penalty opposers can rejoice that a selective ban on death-penalty exists for ‘disappearances’ in Kashmir, Punjab, Assam and Manipur and elsewhere, for murders done by any serving Khaki of any type during ‘performance of duty’, for targeted massacres of Dalits, for murder of ‘Indians’ who don’t consider themselves Indians, for ‘encounter’ killings, for ‘secret killings’ by SULFA and Ikhwan, for air-bombing Indian citizens in the Indian city of Aizawl, for Mumbai riots 1992-93, Bhagalpur 1989, Delhi 1984, Hashimpura 1987, Kashipur-Baranagar 1972 and many, many other crimes done at a false goddess’ sacrificial altar. As a practising Bengali Shakto and a worshipper of Ma Durga, blood-sacrifices in the name of a false goddess sicken me to the core. In this Nation-state of routine ‘encounter’ killings, unmarked mass-graves, death in custody by torture, ‘disappearances’ and other forms of Khaki manliness that will never be given the death-sentence by any court of the land, the late-night events in Lutyens’ Delhi around one man’s execution will ‘go down in history’ as the ‘dance of democracy’.